Long Time Leaving (9 page)

How about the equation of Baptists with Anabaptists? The latter term was originally a scornful one directed at sixteenth-century European Protestants who held that you couldn't rightly be baptized until you were old enough to know what was going on. The word
baptize
comes from the Greek for
dipping.
To
anabaptize
is to rebaptize. In fact, however, the Anabaptists didn't believe in double-dipping—they just held that if you were baptized as an infant, it didn't count. Having been sprinkled myself long before the age of consent, I find this tenet congenial.

However, you will never catch me calling myself a Baptist. All the more so because Northerners assume that I am one, or at least used to be one (and was raised by a mammy), because I am Southern. Nope, I'm a firmly lapsed Methodist. But you can't call that religious either.

So here's what I'm thinking of becoming: a contemplative Anabaptist. The example of this faith cited by
The Columbia Encyclopedia
is Hans Denck, who, before dying in 1527, “submitted to adult baptism but believed the presence of the inner Word in believers precluded any visible organization of the Christian life.”

Because Denck did it, I hereby submit to adult baptism—retroactively, by proxy. The event occurred a couple of years ago when I saw the character Bunny Breckinridge, played by Bill Murray in the movie
Ed Wood,
allowing himself to be totally immersed in the interest of raising money from a religious group to finance one of Wood's ineffably terrible movies. Wood himself, played by Johnny Depp, also submits to baptism for this purpose (dip, Denck, dunk, Depp—you see how it all begins to come together), but Bunny—who keeps planning to go to Mexico for a sex-change operation but never quite pulls it off, so to speak—gets into the spirit of the thing most charmingly.

“Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” Bunny is asked as he is about to be dunked. He shrugs winsomely and says in a soft, maidenly sort of voice, “Sure.”

But what I like most about contemplative Anabaptism, as a living faith, is what comes after baptism: the avoidance of any visible organization.

F
ew people have derived more vocational inspiration from church than Herbert Asbury, 1889-1963. The light he saw, however, was not the light intended. The hard-shell Methodism that Asbury grew up with in Farmington, Missouri, was all about sin—from harlotry to playing the phonograph on Sunday—and downright prodigal ways of repressing and suppressing it. “I was fallow ground for all these seeds of piety,” he writes, “for I was a highly emotional and excitable boy.”

A descendant of historically eminent Methodists, he did not, as expected, grow up to become a bishop. His attitude toward that prospect was neutral until the revival-service night in his teens when the church
humiliated him—seduced him with music and induced him with tugs and shoves and heavy blandishment (he renders the experience almost as a gang rape)—into coming tearfully forward unto the altar and offering his soul to salvation, when in his mind he knew he didn't mean it, didn't want it. Thereafter, writes Asbury, he regarded religion “with a tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart.” He became a newspaperman, which for many lapsed Methodists would have been louche enough, but in 1926 an excerpt from
Up from Methodism
made him scandalously famous.

Asbury sent this memoir of his youth to H. L. Mencken, whom he idolized. Mencken was taken by the chapter “Hatrack,” about Farming-ton's treatment of its outstanding fallen woman. The woman in question, called Hatrack because she was so scrawny, lay with men in fields of stone for small amounts of money. As a character, she is young Asbury in reverse: She attends church longing to be saved, but the fold won't take her in. (Perhaps because who then would fill her civic function?) And so she sneers as he sneered, and turns herself out as the church did him. “Hatrack” appeared in Mencken's
American Mercury,
which delighted in mocking American sanctimony. The “Watch and “Ward Society, whose civic function was to keep sin out of Boston, took one look at “Hatrack” and banned that issue. Mencken made a point of selling a copy, and being arrested for it, on Boston Common. Mencken had his landmark press freedom case—he won in court—and Asbury had his launch. “Within the year,
Up from Methodism
was published.

Asbury went on to a career of reveling in sin, on paper. Most notably, he authored dark-side histories of New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Chicago.
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld with Particular Reference to Its Colorful Iniquities
is the full title of the New Orleans one—on whose dust jacket Asbury's city-underworld series is summed up as follows: “These incredible accounts of violent life and violent death, and love both vile and violent, are as vivid as the red lights that sprinkled the streets he writes of.” In 2002, Martin Scorsese adapted Asbury's
Gangs of New York
into a film about corruption and street fighting next to which the bluenosed Methodism that soured Asbury's youth seems very nearly tolerable.

Mencken himself, having never felt religiosity's siren appeal, made merrier sport of it. Herbie Asbury had been hurt by the church, and he was determined to show it a thing or two. And if he lacked some of what it takes to make a bishop, he had the balls: His take on holiness was brazen in the twenties and remains so today. In fact,
Up from Methodism
sometimes reads like such a tract against religious hypocrisy that readers may wonder whether there isn't something to be said in favor of it.

Methodism began in eighteenth-century England as a socially conscious movement among the exploited working class, whose weakness for cheap gin and neglect of unplanned offspring the Church of England did not deign to address. When brought to the American heartland's shallow-rooted bourgeoisie—most pervasively by Herbert's ancestor, Francis Asbury—the movement continued to lean hard on the evils of drunkenness and lust. In retrospect the sins of joylessness and impacted prurience seem to have been closer to home. But shame and dread did provide considerable prophylaxis—in the days before antibiotics, twelve-step programs, and reliable birth control—against the wages of lower-class sin.

By the time I was growing up in and out of Methodism, half a century after Asbury, it had mellowed a great deal. (And today the United Methodist Church has officially opposed the bellicosity of its most prominent adherent, President George W. Bush.) The church brought my parents together with lifelong friends who, though abstinent, were much nicer, and jollier, than the churchfolk in this book. But the old devils lingered. The generation before me had known Methodism in something like the mode derided by Asbury and never entirely got over it. As I grew more latitudinarian—under the influence of literature, the sixties, and the sort of person that one meets (thank God) as a reporter— my parents and I lost the capacity to talk anything over civilly, much less jovially.

They died young, before we could get through that phase. I doubt my mother and I ever would have, because she was a literalist. So am I, in a way—I love slippery Southern literalism like that of the lady at the cash register in the Nashville airport who, when I told her it sounded like she was catching a cold, said, “Oh, Lord, I hope not. I've already got one.” My mother had that, but she was also afflicted—or comforted, according to her—by fundamentalist realism with regard to final things.

My poor mother's childhood had been blighted by her father's early death from alcoholism and syphilis, and I believe she was terrified for me. If she didn't fear quite literally that I would, as Asbury puts it, “hang throughout eternity on a revolving spit over a great fire in the deepest pit of Hell, while little red devils jabbed white-hot pokers into my quivering flesh and Satan stood by and curled his lip in glee,” she had no other way of imagining an infidel's posthumous years. She must have found it unfathomable that I would adopt a mentality that precluded her seeing
me in the life to come. There had to be a heaven, especially after my father died, because she had to see him there and share the fountain of blessings that would justify her abstemious life on Earth. I wanted to get around a bit while above ground. The gulf between her expectations and mine, and yet the entanglement of them, was indeed a shame.

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.” Those were some great old hymns, which Herbert Asbury loved in spite of himself and came to sing raucous parodies of. In them, the church afforded a not entirely sublimated alternative to the more straightforward forms of intoxication and eroticism. Once, in the seventies, I went, for journalistic reasons, to a church in Manhattan that had been turned into a dance club. People with spiked purple hair were prancing and dancing all over the pulpit. I hated it. I could see my decent parents out there in their pew, needing to believe.

But there was also a ferocity in their worship, and traces of the cankering, perversely prideful self-denial that Herbert Asbury finds in the heritage of his holy forebear Francis, who wrote in his journals: “I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.” Perhaps the most empathetic and the best sentence in
Up from Methodism
is Herbert's final judgment on Bishop Francis: “He yearned for a constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy his yearning.”

The inner Herbert Asbury we get to know less well. A shade is drawn, whose nature may reside in the “tongue in my cheek” and the “sneer in my heart” that his suborned conversion left him with. Whom or what does he love? He may have relished the company of black Farmingtoni-ans, but his way of using the term
darky
is unpleasantly flippant, even allowing for standards of the time. I wish he had told us more about his vaguely sympathetic, not especially sanctified parents and siblings, who may have helped give him the gumption to strike out on his own. Or maybe his parents were too easygoing to be rebelled against, so he took on bigger game.

There is something less than wholly persuasive in his assertion, here in his midthirties, that “without religion I thoroughly enjoy this business of living.” He says he still doesn't like the taste (“Aha!” I can hear my mother saying) of the booze he took up to spite the church. Whether he ever gave up the cigarettes that gave him bad-boy satisfaction, I don't know, but after World War I, when he was gassed, he suffered for the rest of his life from the pulmonary problems that eventually killed him. Most of his books, his chronicles of wickedness, he worked up from newspaper-morgue research. In this book he airily imagines having a
child he'll expose quite rationally to the world's religions; he never had one. But he must have died secure in this belief: that he had nailed
(pace
Bishop Francis) the people who imposed their sacred will upon him when he was vulnerable. God knows (you'd think), there are more than enough such people in the world today.

I
took part in a panel discussion the other day at the 92nd Street Y, in Manhattan. The first time I ever visited that Y, thirty-some-odd years ago, I heard Edmund Wilson read. One of my heroes. A squeaky little voice! Another time I heard Vladimir Nabokov. He might just about as well have been reading in Russian, his accent was so thick. Faulkner had an awful reading voice. So did Hemingway. I don't think an author can get away with a voice like that anymore. Maybe that's why authors don't write as well anymore. If you can stand up and make the welkin ring, passably, with your tonsils, why agonize overly at the keyboard?

But this was not a reading I took part in; it was a panel discussion. The topic was a grim one—humor writing—but the moderator was Leonard Lopate, who is well known for interviewing authors refreshingly well on WNYC, the local public radio station. He has been known to stimulate even
my
interest in whatever book I was hustling around the country, ad nauseam, at the time.

For alphabetical reasons, I was the first member of the panel to be brought out. Lenny introduced me as “the world's most sophisticated redneck.”

He meant well. But it didn't set well with me. Does anybody ever introduce Louise Erdrich as a sophisticated
redskin?
I took my place and tried to think what to say as old Lenny introduced—neither ethnically nor oxymoronically—the other panelists: Jules Feiffer, Joe Queenan, and Cathleen Schine, congenial people all. “When he called on me, to address some humor-writing issue, I was still trying to think what to say about the R-word matter.

If I said, “It never ceases to amaze me, how unself-consciously liberal New Yorkers toss the word
redneck
around,” the audience, I know from
experience, would have chuckled at my touchiness. Even if the audience had been Southern. After all, the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, a Southerner himself, has put out several cheerful books of one-liners beginning “You Might Be a Redneck If…”

“…Your mama keeps a spit-cup on the ironing board,” that sort of thing. I think those books, like old
Amos 'n’ Andy
programs (which must have been a lot more work to produce), are funny. The first I heard about those books was in 1992, after I wrote a column in
Spy
magazine in which I quoted several such redneck-if's (“ …Your wife has ever worn a tube top to a wedding,” and so on), which Bill Arhos, a fellow white Southerner prominent in Texas public television, had sent me on a Xeroxed sheet.

In that column I raised this question: “Do members of other ethnic groups who work in public television circulate this type of material? Circulate it not in outrage but in a spirit of recognition? I don't think so.” The reason my ethnic group did it, I ventured, was that we had a tradition of cryptohumility, of establishing our self-esteem by not being too high on ourselves. I also mentioned that two New York men-of-the-street newspaper columnists had recently referred to presidential aspirant Bill Clinton as “this year's pet cracker” and “just another Southern cracker.” Another thing I could have mentioned is that white Southerners traditionally have a hard time knowing how to take offense if there is nobody around to hit.